Rolland G. Paulston (1930 - 2006)

Short Biography & Significant Contribution

Rolland Paulston was a former
president of CIES (1975) and professor emeritus (1999) at the University of
Pittsburgh's School of Education. He earned his bachelor's degree in art
history and geography at UCLA and his master's degree in economic geography at
the University of Stockholm (Sweden). After teaching social studies in Los
Angeles and Tangier, Morocco, Paulston earned his doctorate in Comparative and
International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1968 he
began teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, was granted the position of
full professor in 1972, and remained an influential figure in comparative
education there until his death in 2006.

In one of
Paulston's early works, an evaluation of the contributing factors to the
results of teacher-centered educational reform in four schools in Peru, he
critically tested the prevailing notion that education is the logical choice
for carrying out change and development in society. In order to understand why
the reform worked in some schools and failed in others, Paulston focused on the
point of contact, or the "interface" of the movement; the teacher and
the community. Instead of relying on a structural functionalist or neo-Marxism
perspective to observe these interactions based on hierarchies or class,
Paulston instead focused on multiple variables including community values (i.e.
religion), self-perception of national/local identity (i.e. language,
ethnicity), and the teacher's own sense of identity in relation to the
community. Paulston concluded that the teacher-centered approach to educational
reforms is more successful when the teacher and school are more closely aligned
to the main cultural characteristics of the community. Infusions of financial
resources, technical experts or teacher training were effective only in
contributing to the failure of reform in a school. This characterization was
prescient and incisive, essentially foreshadowing the problems of the participatory
development movements of the following decades that was "discovered"
and noted by scholars and agencies thirty years later. Traditional dualist
approaches would have only reiterated assumed distinctions based on class or
bureaucratic hierarchies. Paulston's inclusion of human interactions based on
cultural relations added more voices and perspectives to his evaluation, thus
adding more accuracy, validity and applicability to his findings.

Paulston
is best known for his work in "social cartography." For Paulston,
rigid, reductionist perspectives like structural functionalism are not useful
in understanding the "true" reality in a given field of observation
or study. Additionally, Paulston found that equilibrium theories (i.e.
evolutionary, neo-evolutionary, and structural functionalist) of social and
educational reform movements are largely descriptive with very little to offer
by way of predictive capabilities. Conflict or transformative orientations
(i.e. neo-Marxist, cultural revival, and anarchist utopian) or are more useful
in describing and predicting social and educational reform movements, but are
sometimes simply not realistic enough for concrete results. Thus, the
comparativist is left between alternating either/or theoretical constructs that
leave too may gaps or exclude too many non-aligned perspectives and voices.
Enter social cartography.

Paulston
relied significantly on Foucauldian analysis of history to inform his theory of
social cartography. His application of Foucault's postmodernism to comparative
education led him to assert that a postmodern (deconstructive) analysis was the
best means by which to understand educational policy analysis, and this is best
articulated through the process of social cartography. This process allowed the
comparativist to map the spatial relations in which competing perspectives were
situated, providing a better way to understand the manner in which they
negotiated that space in relation to each other. By admitting multiple
"voices" in any given discussion the comparativist is able to
apprehend a more representative picture (or map) of the theoretical space in
which s/he is working, including the identification of his/her space on that
map, an important part of the process for Paulston.

Paulston's
career was marked by a persistent and consistent desire to compare, educate and
transform not just education but the educators and comparativists themselves.
Always keen to improve the field of comparative education, he even issued a
challenge to his fellow colleagues in a speech delivered at a meeting of
comparative education scholars in Canada in 1976. After identifying the
problems, limitations and failures of the comparative education field and
listing possible solutions for them, he adamantly encouraged his colleagues to
comparatively address the political and ideological characteristics of
ethnicity as a social construction with the force of a social movement. He
called for more "rigorous study of ethnogensis" which he felt would
improve comparative education theory and scholarship as well as result in a
more democratic and humane society. Paulston targeted himself, too, with his
criticisms and challenges, working and reworking his approach through social
cartography over many years, and addressing the dynamism and fluidity of
ethnicity as a social force in educational reform.

Educational Background

BA, University of California-Los
Angeles

MA,
University of Stockholm

EdD,
Teachers College, Columbia University

Professional Background

Teacher, Social Studies, Los Angeles
Public Schools

Teacher,
Social Studies, Tangier, Morocco

Professor,
Administrative and Policy Studies, School of Education, University of
Pittsburgh (1968)

Professor
Emeritus, Administrative and Policy Studies, School of Education, University of
Pittsburgh (1999)